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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

> FrontPage was a nightmare.

They all were. HTML was so limited that producing it visually from a WYSIWYG editor was guaranteed to be totally wrong or exceedingly verbose.

With flex and grid I imagine creating such an editor is easier today, but I also imagine those consumers are happy to work off of templates and people who work on front and know HTML and spend most of their time building react components.

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“The HTML is totally wrong and exceedingly verbose” is not exactly something someone who used frontpage cared about.

Well, from my experience there were professional teams using these sorts of tools at the time.

My first gig was hand crafting html pages and the guy I replaced (a "programmer") used one of these WYSIWYG tools.

It wasn't that uncommon in the early days of web shops

HTML was never the problem. It is simple enough to be taught to non technical people. The issue is styling it, making it looks beautiful. And this is where the truth appears: HTML was not designed for building magazin-like pages but hypertext paper books. The very recent introduction of CSS grid shows it.

If HTML could be used as a collection of widget akin to Windows Forms, with an easy grid system (somewhat like XAML), there building an UI page creator would be easy, and user could edit the output unlike with the current tech.

Windows Forms (AFAIK) are not designed to handle multitude of screen formats. HTML/CSS is.

What functionality is missing, in your mind, from Sqaurespace, Webflow, and Wix in order to classify them as UI page creators?

A usable, fast, resource efficient website output in the end.

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